


the remains

by lupinely



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Found Families, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Polyamory, Trans Character, me being unreasonably attached to everyone in kirkwall....the usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:56:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2798645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isn’t that what all of this has been about? The growth, decay. Holding on and starting over. Never quite getting the hang of letting go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trell (qunlat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/gifts).



 

 

 

  
It’s snowing, which perhaps should not be that much of a surprise, but at first Fenris doesn’t think it’s snow, confuses it, just for a moment, with the gray-white ash falling from the sky over Kirkwall as they left it. The ash that coated everything, clung to his eyelashes. The fire that burned, so intensely, in Hawke’s eyes: the curl of their knuckles around their mage’s staff.

“So?” Hawke asks, slings one arm around Fenris’ shoulders. Easy familiarity, seven years in the making. Fenris’ back hardly stiffens at the touch anymore, and he doesn’t at all feel the need to pull away. “What do you think?”

Fenris looks around. Meets, just for a moment, Isabela’s gaze. It’s enough to send her into a fit of quiet giggles, which she hides, artfully, behind her hand.

“It’s cold,” Fenris says at last, truthfully.

Hawke sighs theatrically. “’It’s _cold,’_ he says—this, the land of my birth! The land of freedom, of the Warden who stopped the Blight, of—well, of mud and snow and dog shit. It _is_ cold. I’d forgotten how cold it is.”

Fenris wonders what Hawke sees when they look around this place; certainly not what Fenris sees. Lothering, perhaps; or maybe not. There’s that look in Hawke’s eyes again, just for a moment, a flash, and then it’s gone. It’s always gone. Hawke keeps shoving it down, burying it, while their smile doesn’t quite reach their eyes.

“If only Merrill were here,” Hawke says, finally. “Merrill understood Ferelden. I used to talk to her about it all the time. I….”

Isabela steps forward and slides her hands into the pockets on either side of Hawke’s waist. Rests her head on Hawke’s shoulder, turns her face towards their neck. “I like Ferelden well enough, sweet thing.”

“You’re just trying to get on my good side,” Hawke accuses her.

Isabela hums, presses her mouth against the side of Hawke’s jaw. “Aren’t I already on your good side?”

Hawke laughs. That’s what they’re best at—it’s silly to say it like that, so simply, without qualification, but the truth remains.

“Come on,” they say, finally; “we’ve got a long way left to go,” and they do.

 

-

 

The air smells like sulfur, like static electricity, like the ending of something important and terrible that you can never, ever get back once it’s over. That’s what scares Hawke the most—though they’ll never admit it, ever, to anyone.

Varric stops running first; slows, still gripping Bianca in front of him, his knuckles pale. His hair is loose around his face and he stops running and he looks at Hawke and Hawke sees it there, in his eyes, before Varric even has to speak.

 _Don’t, please,_ Hawke thinks, but they don’t say it.

“I have to go back, Hawke,” Varric says.

The others stare at him: Isabela and Fenris and Merrill and Aveline. Merrill is shaking, but her eyes are clear. She knows, too. She’s observant, that one: a mind like a glass edge.

Varric shoulders Bianca so that his hands are empty. Holds them out, palms upward. “I can’t leave,” he says. “It’s my home.”

 _Home’s not a place,_ Hawke wants to shout at him, and doesn’t; _you’re my home, so don’t you dare leave me._

Aveline’s hand closes around the pommel of her blade. “I’m not leaving, either,” she says. “I will go back with you, Varric. Keep you safe.”

Varric meets her gaze. He nods.

“But what are you going to do?” Hawke asks.

“I don’t know,” Varric says. “There are still good people left there, innocent people who don’t deserve what Blondie—what Anders has brought onto them.”

Anders’ name a spell over all of them, a malediction. Bitter silence, the empty air.

“If you’re going to stay, I should stay too,” Hawke says. But they know it’s not true even as they say it; there’s nothing left for them in Kirkwall anymore. Just a pair of well-tended graves and a house too big for them alone. Just like Ferelden.

“No, Hawke.” Aveline comes forward and takes Hawke’s hand, just like that. _My choice,_ Hawke thinks, and their eyes burn. They hide it, because they always hide it. _You know me. I always save the day._ Not this time, though. Not when it’s ever really mattered.

“Take Isabela and Fenris and Merrill and get away from here,” Aveline says. “Maybe, when the city is quiet—if the city is ever quiet—” She trails off. “It’s not safe for you here anymore.”

“I can’t leave you,” Hawke says.

Isabela touches Hawke’s wrist, gently, and says nothing. She doesn’t have to say anything.

 _This isn’t what I wanted to happen,_ Hawke thinks, please, Maker, anyone, make this right, but how many times have they thought this while they watched someone they loved walk away from them, or held them in their arms and watched them die, and gotten no answer? Just the silence, the growing vastness inside them. Hawke lost their first family, one by one; and now they get to watch as their chosen one splinters.

But isn’t that what all of this has been about? The growth, decay. Holding on and starting over. Never quite getting the hang of letting go.

Hawke squeezes Aveline’s hands, lets them go. “Be safe.”

Hawke turns to Varric. They don’t know, for what feels like the first time in their life—certainly the first time when talking to Varric—what to say.

It seems Varric doesn’t, either. He stands there, silently; almost doesn’t move when Hawke lunges forward and throws their arms around him and hugs him, bitterly tight, and then he does—his hands coming up to Hawke’s shoulders, his fingers pressing constellations there.

“Asshole,” Hawke says finally, their voice muffled.

Varric smiles. “Ah, Hawke,” he says. “You’re my greatest muse—you really think I’m gonna let this be goodbye forever?”

 

-

 

It’s strange, the parallel of it—or perhaps more accurately the parallax, the similarities not quite as striking as the aligned differences. Like closing one eye and then the other, looking at the same thing each time but the angle is different and the meaning of the thing changes.

Hawke ran from Ferelden to Kirkwall because they’d lost everything; they ran from Kirkwall to Ferelden in order to hold on to what little they have left.

They don’t stay in Ferelden long. Just long enough to make the long, painstaking journey back to Lothering. Redcliffe’s been reconstructed, and Denerim is all but recovered from the battle that ravaged its streets, but Lothering hasn’t been salvaged at all: left to rot, left to ruin. The land is still barren, cracked earth that can’t hold life anymore. Fereldans talks about the Fifth Blight like it’s something that happened to the entire country equally, but Hawke knows that’s not true. Everyone from Lothering knows the truth of it, the truth that some places were lost entirely, obliterated from map, earth, and heart: revisitable now only in memory.

But there’s something there that Hawke needs to see. And so they go.

Fenris and Isabela offer to come with Hawke, and Hawke almost lets them. But this isn’t a place that can hold Fenris and Isabela in it: this is a place that only Hawke can stand in now.

Two graves: separated by a few miles, both well hidden, both undisturbed. That’s the thing about growing up in an apostate family—you know all about the ways that the dead can be brought back to life, seen the disfigured apparitions. The dead brought back except in the one way you wish they could be.

On Bethany’s grave, Hawke places a single yellow flower that will never wilt. On Malcolm’s, a handful of warm embers that will never cool. To match the never-melting ice on Leandra’s grave, and the green ivy on Carver’s that will never spread, nor die.

 _Hello,_ Hawke hears their father saying, across echoes, across time; _we’re the Hawkes._

 _Hello,_ Hawke thinks; _I’m Hawke._

 

-

 

Hawke doesn’t say much about it when they return from Lothering; not that Isabela ever really expected them to. That’s Hawke for you: can’t get them to shut up when you need them to, can’t get them to talk when they have something they actually need to say. She slips her hand into Hawke’s without a word instead. She understands the appeal of pilgrimages home even though she’s never made one herself, never will, and she doesn’t think Fenris will, either; if she ever returned to Nevarra or Fenris to Tevinter, she doesn’t think it would be of their own free wills.

But that’s not fair, maybe; Hawke has good memories here mixed with the loss, with what came after. That’s a different sort of pain. Isabela has long since learned not to quantify pain, to compete with another’s; not like this. Qualifying it is much easier. The taste of loss, the color of it. It differs from person to person.

Hawke falls asleep almost at once. On their side facing Isabela; one hand tucked under the pillow. Isabela reaches out and strokes the dark hair out of Hawke’s face, runs one fingertip over the delicate skin of Hawke’s eyelids before pulling away.

Fenris is still awake, pacing; always pacing. Isabela motions him over, starts, with gentle, practiced fingers, to undo the binder around his chest. He doesn’t react to her touch but allows her to continue, and that is reaction enough for her.

“They need so much looking after, don’t they?” Isabela says after a moment.

“Hawke?” Fenris laughs, very quietly. “I suppose they do.”

Varric used to ask her how she could get along with Fenris so well—like it should’ve been hard, and maybe it was hard for the others. But for her it’s always been easy; Fenris is not so hard to understand, after all. Most people never bother to try.

Isabela runs her hands down Fenris’ arms, leans in against his shoulders so they are pressed flush together; warm skin, quiet solace. His hair is getting longer than she’s used to seeing on him, and she brushes it aside.

“Do you think we’re up for it?” she asks him.

“Maker, no,” Fenris says. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

 

-

 

Merrill leaves them before they leave the Free Marches. The chaos from Kirkwall is spreading and strengthening rather than abating, as Hawke had hoped it might if they left the city. Elves are taking a brunt of the violence as they always have: people want a scapegoat, and it’s harder to reach the mages in their Circles than the elves in their alienages.

That’s what holds Merrill back. The belief—the hope—that she can help these people: her people. It’s all she’s ever wanted to do, in the end.

Hawke doesn’t want to let her go. She and Isabela argue bitterly over it until Isabela points out that it’s Merrill’s choice, not Hawke’s, and that Hawke isn’t Merrill’s protector: they’re her friend. Hawke falls quiet, mollified.

“Don’t worry,” Merrill says. She takes Hawke’s hands. “I’ll see you again, Hawke. We’re all going to see each other again, and sooner than you think.”

 _I wish I could be as sure,_ Hawke thinks, but says; “Well, if Merrill says so, it must be true.”

Merrill’s smile, slender and faint.

After all that, Isabela is the one who cries, though she tries to hide it. Hawke, loath to let go of Merrill’s hands, finally does so. And Fenris, who’s been facing away from the three of them this whole time, oblique and off-center, says quietly, without meeting Merrill’s gaze: “Travel safely.”

Merrill is silent for a moment, like she doesn’t know how to speak. “Dareth shiral, Fenris,” she says at last, and leaves them.

 

-

 

They leave Ferelden, traveling through Orlais because Isabela says she’s always wanted to do so, and because she wants a new hat, with a feather maybe; and because Orlais is the seat of the Chantry, the home of the Divine, and Hawke thinks maybe they need to keep an ear on the ground for what’s going to happen now, after Kirkwall.

Turns out they don’t need to be as subtle as all that. The three of them are in Orlais only a few days when the rest of the Circles across Thedas start to fall: one by one by one, and none of them goes quietly.

Varric sends a message: unsigned, unmarked, short. _There’s a Seeker coming to the city. Sounds like trouble. Wants to know about the Champion._

 _Make me sound good,_ Hawke writes back. _Leave out the part where the arishok gutted me._

“Oh, really?” Isabela asks, reading over Hawke’s shoulder. “But that’s my favorite part!”

“It should be,” Hawke grumps: one hand going, unconsciously, to the huge distorted scar across their abdomen, the blow that almost killed them. “I did it to save your life.”

“And look how grateful I am for it,” Isabela says, chastisingly, and kisses Hawke on the mouth.

 

-

 

“What will you do?” Fenris asks Hawke. It’s quiet, very early morning. The sun like golden spools of unwinding thread.

Hawke’s hand still where they’re braiding Isabela’s hair while she dozes. “What do you mean?”

“It’s unlike you to remove yourself from a conflict,” Fenris says. “Especially not for your own safety—especially not when the conflict is this important.”

Hawke is silent.

“And yet here you are,” Fenris says. He wants to hold out his hand—he wants to be merciful and can’t. Hawke’s whole family has died for this chaos, whether they knew it at the time or not—whether they wanted to or not. “So I wondered. What will you do?”

Isabela is awake now, her dark brown eyes watching Hawke, watching Fenris.

“You ask me that as if I have an answer,” Hawke says at last. “I have none for you. Is it so strange to think I might just be tired of fighting?”

Fenris and Isabela share a glance. “Yes, sweet thing,” Isabela says.

The scars on Hawke’s hand, the silver streak that started growing in their hair after Carver died. Their mage’s staff in the corner: cracked, split, worn smooth in the grooves where their hands hold it.

“Maybe you’re right,” Hawke says. “Maybe I will return to it. If I can do any good at all, it will be hard for me to say no. But it will be hard for me to say yes, too. That’s what this is. That’s what—” They flounder, uselessly for a moment. Always so difficult for them to find the right words, the truthful ones. “There’s only so much I can bear to lose,” they say at last. “What I have left is not something I am willing to ever part with.”

Isabela twines her arms around Hawke’s waist, pulls them close. “You won’t have to,” she says; “part with us, I mean.”

Hawke’s face breaks sideways, an almost-smile; “What makes you so sure you’re what I was talking about?” The attempt at levity—the grasping towards insincerity.

But Isabela, this time, will not have it. “This,” she says, touching the red cloth tied around her upper arm; “this,” she says, reaching out and pulling Fenris in by the red cloth tied round the belt of his waist, still bright and unfaded and as deep crimson as the day Hawke gave it to him. “This,” Isabela says, touching the scar across Hawke’s abdomen with her fingertips, then the hollow of Hawke’s neck, then the corner of their mouth.

“This,” Fenris agrees, quietly: touches the end of Isabela’s braided hair, slides a thumb under Hawke’s eyes.

Hawke catches Fenris’ hand, holds it still. “You caught me,” they say, like it was hard to do—like they’ve ever been anything but transparent. “You want to know what I will do? I can answer that, quite simply: whatever you will do.”

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
